What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera 542
prostoalex writes "The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. The magazine looks into the latest features that are incorporated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Foundation's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera. From the article: "We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1 out for a spin. Both the Firefox beta and the Opera beta are available for download, although Opera isn't publicizing this early testing version; the browsers' final editions should be out around the time you read this. On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""
I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera (Score:3, Interesting)
But I am getting disappointed with FF - it crashes badly, processes get stuck, memory is an issue. There are problems. I hope these problems will be fixed quickly because this is getting annoying, and even though I told DarkSin here [mozilla.org] that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.
Re:Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
I suggest you give Opera another chance, since it sounds like you gave up on it rather quickly.
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Opera (Score:4, Interesting)
The Article is a Bit Misleading (Score:3, Interesting)
Aside of the above, it is a pretty good article. Kudos to my fav. browser maker
You've gotta check out IE Tab! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Opera? (Score:2, Interesting)
In all seriousness the percentage of people using Opera compaired to IE or even Firefox is trivial. Why not start talking about iCab or winamp's built in browser? Opera is and probably always will have a trivial userbase..
Stupid mods (Score:2, Interesting)
Perfectly valid point, Opera is one of the smallest browsers. I would rather use seamonkey than opera for several reasons:
* it's free and Free (FSF)
* it looks better
* runs better on linux
* XUL
* etc.
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Interesting)
-Security. That alone is a reason to NOT use IE. Worst piece of unsecure code Microsoft EVER made. See the newest Javacript exploit for it? Affects fully patched browsers.... Just like we had one not long ago using IFrames instead. It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what. It's by FAR the main reason why spyware is an issue at all (the users are also partially to blame though). They can keep updating it or copy features like tabs, I truly don't care, I'll never use it! (If it didn't break other stuff, I'd remove it completely)
-Features. Firefox may have high memory usage, but the extensions... I only wish something like that would exist for other browsers (although I also wish some of those were built-into Firefox/didn't need an extension for it). It's addictive. The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc. Not to mention other niceties like XUL apps (like the totally wicked DevEdge MultiBar and several others), usercontent.css, bookmark management/sync utils, the about:config page and other such things. I wish Opera (or another decent browser) would support them too...
Anyways. I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.
Agreed - major performance problems with Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Second point. The Flash thing is truly nauseating, but it's not a firefox cpu issue, what it seems to be is the XUL UI not having any priority on events. It's not that the browser won't switch tabs when flash is running, it just needs to be shaken awake. For example, flash is doing its thing (soaking up unused cpu), you click a tab, firefox simply does not respond, for minutes sometimes, it's infuriating, an absolute usability nightmare - but now bring forward another window, return firefox to the top - bingo it switches tabs. It's XUL event handling (or lack of events) that's the problem, not flash.
Ok, some educated guess work there, but it can't be far wrong. If they concentrated on a few of these issues, the improvements could be truly staggering. God I hope I get a chance to help - and you guys should all help too if you can.
Re:safari!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, I hate it when post like the parent and grand-parent get modded insightful, because well, they are not. Since when has it been the browser's fault when 3rd party plugins fail to work?
Not only is Flash a 3rd party plugin, so it has nothing to do with the Firefox team, but it is also Proprietary and close source, which means even if the Firefox developer wanted to fix it, they couldn't.
Quite frankly your arguments sound alot like those people who blame windows for running slowly and having adverts pop-up when they install a 'cool new search bar'. Place your blame where it lies, not on the first thing you see
In other words if you want your Firefox to stop crashing you may a) uninstall flash, b) install flashblock(not sure if that'll work. it might) or c) Bitch loudly at macromedia until they release a version that doesn't.
On the question of memory usage, there you have a valid point and it is being addressed. Firefox 1.5RC3 seems to play alot nicer with my memory on my system (linux), than 1.0 did.
Firefox unfriendly to European languages (Score:5, Interesting)
German, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several other European languanges differ from English in the way that nouns are joined into one word. This often makes for very long words.
Example: "Noun joining example" in Norwegian is "Substantivsammensettingseksempel". True, this is a very long word, but the effect happens all the time.
We are preparing a new version of several big-brand European online stores using the same technological foundation. For these stores, many of whom are market leaders in their respective countries, we wish to use a layout where 3 products are shown side by side, with teaser text to the right of a teaser image. This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide, and this, again, demands soft hyphenation. IE, Safari and Opera supports this, but alas, Firefox does not.
A pity really. Firefox is our default development browser because of an otherwise acceptable standards implementation.
Has firefox fixed updates? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know firefox has the icon change near the upper-right of the screen, but for me it never worked (the upgrade would always freeze, on 3 different machines), and I always had to install a fresh copy from the firefox website.
Is this common for other people, or has anyone else experienced this problem?
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
By all means. Parent poster wasn't even the kind of guy that could help with that... it's ok. Seriously. Not everyone is a code monkey. The firefox team strikes me as the kind of people who are doing their damnedest to accomplish this. I'm as impatient as anyone too... it takes twice as long as the most patient person ever wants to wait. Sorry.
But not all bugs are Firefox. Firefox on windows involves two components, firefox *AND* windows. If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)?
Of course. But he's not reporting a bug, he's complaining about some loosely-related problem that he's simply too technically incompetent to describe adequately. He's using a platform for which it is notoriously hard to use any debugging tools. For which no useful error messages are ever displayed. Hell, he doesn't even have any debugging tools, unless he spent god knows how much on Visual Studio.NET.
And for him to compare a web browser to something that was testified in a federal courtroom to be an "OS component/subsystem", well, it's just disingenous at best. Microsoft makes no web browser... ask them why they make it so tough for others to write web browsers that don't crash, when they aren't even willing to make one themselves.
If he really just *HAS TO* make a comparison, ask him to compare camino with IE5 on a mac for us, to let us really know which one is better.
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:2, Interesting)
You can't have both, there's no free lunch here, and the fact is that standards implemented in a vacuum have had significantly less success than standards which follow actual implementations (OSI anyone?)...
I have nothing against calling a spade a spade, Microsoft's business practices leave a lot to be desired. But you can't knock them or anyone else for trying to innovate in their implementations. It's those innovations that help pave the way for the standards you obviously appreciate. Once the innovations show up, content developers take advantage of them, and help further the case that the standards bodies should take a look at how to add this to Web++...
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a pointless remark. The ship is sinking... he's worried he'll get wet if he jumps into the ocean. He will get wet... there's no other way. It's going to cost him... sad, but there's no way out of it. If it helps, I'll gladly concede that the lost money was swindled from him.
I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability.
Yes, gamers say that. But their games crap out on them, and they refuse to admit the culprit, or even own up to the constant os rebuilding they have to do. Corporate environments do it too... on compaq/dell/hp machines with standardized systems, and with aggressive policing of all the machines. SPs are up to date. Only applications that are carefully tested are allowed on them. A minimum of shareware software, and or vertical market software on them. A minimum number of third-party apps on any single machine. The home user that wants to download a canasta card shareware game, this simply doesn't apply to them.
And yet, when windows isn't the software on the machine, it can have any number of apps (even if you don't get the selection you'd like).
It really is windows. Everyone refuses to see it.
Do I think they intentionally sabotage firefox? I doubt it very much. Do they put together such a shitty system that anything past an empty MFC template app will have weird problems? Yes, without a doubt.
r possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it
It is the users machine. But is it a hardware problem? Maybe 3 out of 100 times, it's bad ram. Or a CPU whose fan is failing, and the temperature has been too high for too long. Or a hd that is in borderline failure. But those cases, eventually you realize something is up, you fix it. Hardware problems very rarely go unrealized forever. That leaves alot of software problems.
The biggest piece of software is *always* windows. Is it a big black hole? Hell yes. But it's not my fault. I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems. But I give up on it. There will be people here having this guy check dll build versions, and running regmon and lord knows a million other things, all trying desperately to understand what really happens in windows. For some of them, it will be voodoo that they think they know, but their comprehension is nil... others will come as close as anyone ever does to understanding it, but they'll still fail. And that last 5% that is unknowable will bite them in the ass. Over and over. Screw that.
It's not worth it anymore.
Get an OS where it's 100% knowable. My choice is linux. Yours can be anything, I'm not a snob. But it can't be windows. Sure, it's difficult. Knowable doesn't mean easily knowable, or instantly knowable. But it does mean the end of voodoo, if that's something you desire.
Re:Shouldn't be that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.
We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).
Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.
When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat (Score:5, Interesting)
is that just too hard for a multiplatform? bitmap scaling in software is trivial btw, go google it FF-devs.
Re:Whatever (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you even noticed that the page loads and sometimes a flash of the first frame of flash is loaded before its replaced by the flash nobble?
I uninstalled flash because of this little niceness.
In IE on Windows, I could do the same with a quick simple reg fix (on or off by a double click when needed - it just modified the killbits on the activex).
In FF its a bit more complicated, its either on or its off.
I would like to see a generic ObjectBlock code implimented within firefox itself which will block *any* content right at the core. It should only actively create the documeent after you click it (or whitelist the site/content type)
Re:Completely non-informative article (Score:3, Interesting)
I've tried IE7 Beta 1 and let me tell you. They fucked up the UI in every single way possible. Rearranged everything known, and basicly implemented tabs in the poorest way I've ever seen it implemented.
Even people complaining about Opera's "untraditional" default UI, would praise Opera after seeing this mess. The best part? It can't be configured to work in a sane or usable way.
In short, from top and down: Tabs on top. Then the URL-bar. Then the toolbar and finally the menu-bar. In all honesty, you can rearrenge the toolbar and menubar, but the tabs and URL-bar has to remain on top.
Maybe there are fixes, but if an advanced user can't figure it out in 5 minutes, I call it "broken". Which seems to be the most fitting word I can think of for IE7.
what we need for compliant browsers (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.
(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.
The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.
SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?
Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.
EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.
Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.
THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.
That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.
Wrong Methods (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that's the reason. I think the FF devs would love to fix these issues, but haven't been able to. Furthermore, I think that this is because they built the beast the wrong way.
In the early days of the Mozilla project, they were building one big Communicator with lots of features and workarounds for broken sites and dog knows what else, all built upon a cross-platform framework with lots of abstractions and all. It was horribly slow. It was a memory hog. It was a huge download. It was buggy.
When Mozilla was about feature complete, they started working on speedups. The results were quite impressive. They got it to a usable speed. Then they finally got smart and created a separate project just for the browser. This browser would be very light-weight and fast. The developers started stripping out code, removing features, speeding things up, and reducing the size of the download.
After several years, we now have Firefox. It's the slowest, most memory hungry, and most crash-prone browser I've ever used. Looking at the history of the project, I am not surprised. It's the wrong way to develop things. You first make something simple that works, and then you can add features to it (preferably in a modular way, so that people who don't want the features can choose not to have them). What they did was first add all the features, and then try to make it simple. That doesn't work. I was saying this in the early days, and I'm still saying it now.
Re:Whatever (Score:2, Interesting)
I know that I am probably also not the average Web user (who is?), and surely Firefox has space for improvement, but I find it amusing that you make such a strong statement based only on your experience.
In general, though, I have been installing Firefox on the computers of my friends and colleagues, and the vast majority of them have been very happy about it. I even know a few typical secretaries who cannot stop promoting it to their friends, which, from my geeky point of view, is a wonderful phenomenon to witness.
Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages (Score:2, Interesting)
FF vs Fx (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
One word: Flashblock [mozdev.org]
Here endeth the lesson.
Re:Shouldn't be that complicated (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat (Score:2, Interesting)
That leaves the version that doesn't change relative percentages. Note, that text wrapping also uses relative percentages, so text should usually wrap inside the browser borders. This basically means the following, assuming 150% zoom:
* Images will take 150% of their base pixel size.
* Text will take 150% of their base pixel size.
* Pixel offsets should be multiplied by 150% (1.5)
* Relative percentages should remain the same.
* Text should wrap as it currently does.
In some cases, there will be problems when text/images are forced outside of the width of the page, but that is nothing different than if you resized your current browser and made it really small. A good browser should be able to handle those cases.
It isn't brain surgery. Opera has done it for a long long time. Unfortunally, firefox/mozilla hasn't come closer to a solution since the feature suggestion was added to bugzilla in the year 1999 (bug #4821).
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:3, Interesting)
You touch upon your problems with high memory usage in FF. Other people around here have complained about this as well, including stories about memory leakage and crashes. The general consensus seems to be that the cause of these problems are the extensions, and not FF itself. It's been said that if you just turn off the extensions everything works fine. Sure, you could do this, but then you take away perhaps the major feature that makes people like FF so much.
So, what does all this tell you? What it should tell you is that the extension mechanism in FF is flawed. Since the FF extenstions can not be properly confined you will always run the risk of malfunctional or malicious extensions accessing and consuming browser resources that it shouldn't.
The good news is that since (to my knowledge) FF extensions are written in XML and ECMAScript rather than, e.g., C, it should in theory be possible to control to a better extent which and how many resources an extenstion has access to. I have too little knowledge about the extension mechanism in FF to say whether such a solution is really feasible, though. All I can say is that if FF is going to take security, stability, and robustness seriously, more effort must be put into properly designing the extension architecture.
And as for Opera not having the same possibilities for extensions as FF, this is IMHO a wise move. Yes, I know that Opera has the User JS stuff, but for some reason this has never caused me any troubles whatsoever. Not that I have much experience with the User JS design or have played around with many User JS extensions, mind you.
Re:what we need for compliant browsers (Score:3, Interesting)
13.16 Alpha channel processing
The alpha channel can be used to composite a foreground image against a background image. The PNG datastream defines the foreground image and the transparency mask, but not the background image. PNG decoders are not required to support this most general case. It is expected that most will be able to support compositing against a single background colour.
This is the funny thing about standards. They're generally not as black and white as people think they are! They contain lots of passages that say implentors "should" do this or "are not required" to do that. In this case, IE simply composites against a single background color (gray, IIRC).
Another Slashdot myth busted...
Oversimplification (Score:2, Interesting)
That's only part of the picture. Currently, Secunia's most critical bug in IE is rated "extremely critical" (the highest rating). Then, looking at IE's records, we see that 15% of its bugs are "extremely critical" and 29% are "highly critical." Compared to Firefox's 4% "extremely critical" (which ends up being only one - and that one only affected *nix) and 24% "highly critical" (which sounds awful close, but IE has about triple the vulnerabilities that Firefox has).
And that doesn't even take into account that Firefox is an open source application whereas IE is not. How many bugs in IE are just temporarily hidden because it's closed source?